There were lots of inspirational speakers at Arts Council England’s No Boundaries conference last week, which took place simultaneously in Bristol and Manchester, with a live link-up between the two. The technology alone was a small miracle, and the format (short presentations, no panels) reminded one of a better-funded version of Pilot’s terrific and enormously influential Shift Happens conferences.

Inspiration was found in numerous presentations. Natalia Kaliada of Belarus Free Theatre pointed up the fact that in her country artists fear speaking up for risk of losing their lives, while in the UK artists fear speaking up for risk of losing their funding. Poet and playwright Jackie Kay spoke movingly about art and identity, and Basma El Husseiny persuasively detailed the place for art convoys, not just aid convoys, in the refugee camps of the Middle East. The international component was crucial in making this conference less navel-gazing and more outward looking.

Of course the most interesting way to read No Boundaries is as an indicator of the direction of Arts Council thinking. The name may have changed since it was called State of the Arts, but effectively No Boundaries is an ACE construction, speaking to itself and its national portfolio organisations (NPOs), which is reflected in the price of the conference, the singular lack of representation of individual artists and independent companies, and the concentration on institutions. I’d really like to know why the Manchester venue was never full, even when the event was apparently sold out. Which institutions bought tickets – presumably using public money to do so – but then didn’t turn up? Perhaps next year, every NPO could also pay for some unfunded artists to come, operating a sliding scale depending on the amount of public subsidy they receive. For all its positives, the conference feels like an event for those already in the club.

By no stretch of the imagination could you claim that those involved represented a cross-section of the UK arts scene. It was hard to believe that those chosen to speak in the final summing-up and reflections session were randomly selected. Three of the eight people chosen to give their views came from the pinnacles of the Arts Council or from the British Council, both funders of the event. As Unlimited’s Jo Verrent suggested so eloquently in her presentation, who gets to do the selecting really matters and affects what gets seen and heard. This goes for conferences as much as in any grant-making or commissioning process.

So what might we take away from the conference in terms of ACE thinking, particularly in light of the upcoming spending review in which the Department for Culture, Media & Sport has been asked to create models for 40% and 25% cuts? It’s worth being reminded, as Alastair Smith of the Stage has pointed out , what carnage a 40% cut handed on to the Arts Council might mean. It’s also worth remembering that if local authority budgets are so squeezed in the spending review that they can only fund essential services, then the arts would be badly hit to a point that it would make some NPOs unviable. Local authority funding is less significant in London, so it would be those out of the capital who would be disproportionally hit.

There were two key presentations at No Boundaries in terms of policy, and they were John Knell and Maria Balshaw’s contributions, given in a session asking how the money flows and how changing structures and policies might make it flow better. In both instances, the suggestion was that big, rather than small, is beautiful. Knell argued, often persuasively, that too often arts organisations are merely clinging on by their fingertips for survival and that some should be allowed to die. I’ve previously argued that no theatre is too big to fail, but Knell says that far too many are too small to succeed.

Of course the ecology approach has been exactly what has been lacking in ACE policy in the good times, and it would need to show a bravery it has not previously exhibited if it is going to take some of the decisions, many of them almost certainly hard, that will be necessary over the next five years. But while the argument of being too small to succeed may well apply in other sectors, it certainly isn’t the case in theatre, where energy and artistic vibrancy often come from smaller independent companies who are nimble, flexible and creative, make a little go a very long way and who serve particular communities extremely well. It is they, and individual artists, who are the life-blood of theatre. In fact, discussion around the funding of individual artists strikes me as something that needs to take place. Particularly at a time when Grants for the Arts lottery funding is clearly under enormous pressure.

The danger is that the kind of “platform organisation” that Knell proposes could simply end up being another layer of gatekeepers dispensing crumbs from the table to those working in areas about which they have little grasp, knowledge or real interest. How do the local, the community and the grassroots thrive in such a set-up? In 10 minutes, Knell didn’t have time to address these issues (or indeed, how we could ensure that platform organisations might act not just in their own interests but be town squares rather than monasteries), but we should watch and see how this one develops.

The audience at No Boundaries, ACE conference Photograph: Chris Payne/pr

Maria Balshaw, director of the Whitworth, also argued against squabbling among arts organisations. She very sensibly pointed to the advantages gained in Manchester by 20 years of well thought-out civic investment and argued that different ways of organising can bring growth. All of this was good stuff, including the call for more courage and less organisational ego. She talked about the arrival of the Factory in Manchester, saying that we shouldn’t be afraid of a big idea because we think it threatens the patch we are on, pointing out that no big arts organisation ever failed because of the arrival of another big arts organisation down the road.

That’s true. But of course the local shop – providing a real function within the community – does sometimes fail with the arrival of a supermarket down the road, and the same might be true about the arts. The double-edged sword of the success of the NT Live programme is that it has helped some small venues survive, but at the expense of programme slots for artists and companies making new work. It is those who are at the bottom who can suffer disproportionately from the success of big organisations.

It would be good to have a much wider discussion around the big-is-beautiful proposition, particularly if it is gaining traction at the Arts Council, and specifically how it might relate to theatre, which often has issues in relation to buildings and their geographical positions across the country. Not least because, as former Arts Council executive director Moira Sinclair (now leading the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) pointed out, small and local can be beautiful too. In theatre, one size is never going to fit all.